Tag Archives: Philosophy and Biology Seminar

Elliott Sober is Hans Reichenbach Professor and William F. Vilas Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA. He is one of the founders of the field of philosophy of biology, a major philosopher “in” science, and a specialist of evolutionary biology. He is also a member of the PhilInBioMed Scientific Committee.
 
Abstract
Evolutionary gradualism, the randomness of mutations, and the hypothesis that natural selection exerts a pervasive influence on evolutionary outcomes are pair-wise logically independent.  Can the claims about selection and mutation be used to formulate an argument for gradualism?  In his Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, R.A. Fisher made an important start at this project in his famous “geometric argument” about the fitness consequences of random mutations that have different sizes of phenotypic effect.  Kimura’s theory of how the probability of fixation depends on both the selection coefficient and the effective population size shows that Fisher’s argument for gradualism was mistaken.  Here we analyze Fisher’s argument and explain how Kimura’s theory leads to a conclusion that Fisher did not anticipate. We identify a fallacy that reasoning about fitness differences and their consequences for evolution should avoid.  We distinguish forward-directed from backward-directed versions of gradualism.  The backward-directed thesis may be correct, but the forward-directed thesis is not.

Patricia Churchland is UC President’s Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
Please find the video below :

Talk : Explainable AI and medicine
Speaker :
Emanuele Ratti is a philosopher based in the Institute of Philosophy and Scientific Method at Johannes Kepler University Linz. Before his current appointment, he worked at the University of Notre Dame, and he holds a PhD in ethics and foundations of the life sciences from the European School of Molecular Medicine (SEMM), in Milan.
His research trajectory is in history and philosophy of science and technology (biomedicine and data science). In particular, he is interested in how data science and biomedicine shape one another, both in epistemic and non-epistemic terms.
Abstract :
In the past few years, several scholars have been critical of the use of machine learning systems (MLS) in medicine, in particular for three reasons. First, MLSs are theory agnostic. Second, MLSs do not track any causal relationship. Finally, MLSs are black-boxes. For all these reasons, it has been claimed that MLSs should be able to provide explanations of how they work – the so-called Explainable AI (XAI). Recently, Alex John London claims that these reasons do not stand scrutiny. As long as MLSs are thoroughly validated by means of rigorous empirical testing, we do not need XAI in medicine. London’s view is based on three assumption: (1) we should treat MLSs as akin to pharmaceuticals, for which we do not need an understanding of how they work, but only that they work; (2) XAI plays one role in medicine, which is to assess reliability and safety; (3) MLSs have unlimited interoperability and little transfer-costs. In this talk, I will question London’s assumptions, and I will elaborate an account of XAI that I call ‘explanation-by-translation’. In a nutshell, XAI’s goal is to integrate MLS tools in medical practice; and in order to fulfill this integration task, XAI translates or represent MLSs findings in a way that is compatible with the conceptual and representational apparatus used in that system of practice in which MLS has to be integrated. I will illustrate ‘explanation-by-translation’ in action in medical diagnosis, and I will show how this account is helpful for understanding, in different contexts, whether we need XAI, what XAI has to explain, and how XAI has to explain it.
Please find the video of the talk here :

The talk will be given by Zoom at 6pm, Paris time zone (GMT+1)
James Tabery is an Associate Professor at the University of Utah (USA), with appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Pediatrics, and the Department of Internal Medicine (Program in Medical Ethics and Humanities). His research areas are history and philosophy of science, as well as bioethics. In particular, he examines the history and modern day implementation of genetics–how debates surrounding that science have evolved over the last century, what impact genetic results are having in the criminal justice system, what impact genetics is having in the clinical domain, and who has benefited and who has been harmed historically be genetic research. His research has been reported on in The New York Times, National Geographic, Time Magazine, and National Public Radio. He is the author of Beyond Versus: The Struggle to Understand the Interaction of Nature and Nurture, Cambridge, Mass, The MIT Press (2014), and many papers.
Abstract:
In the late 1990’s, pharmaceutical company executives who were committed to integrating genomics into the pharmaceutical industry introduced a series of phrases to capture and market this pharmacogenomic turn in their businesses: (1) pharmacogenomics was in contrast to “one pill fits all” medicine, (2) pharmacogenomics was about getting “the right drug, to the right patient, at the right time”, and (3) pharmacogenomics paved the way for “personalized medicine”. This concept of personalized medicine quickly expanded to capture any notion of genomic medicine. Soon, clinicians and researchers became worried about the language of personalized medicine. First, doctors had been personalizing medicine for centuries (if not millennia), so the idea that genomics somehow uniquely ushered in an era of personalization was misleading. Second, what geneticists were calling personalized medicine didn’t really personalize medicine; it grouped patient populations into groups based on their genomic profiles. And third, personalized medicine became surrounded by heady promises of miracle cures and breakthrough treatments which were recognized largely as hype. As a result, starting around 2009-2011, a number of communities abandoned talk of “personalized medicine” and replaced it with “precision medicine”, where the revised idea was that adding genomic information about patients to clinical care would get at the underlying causes of health/illness (vs. just treating the symptoms) and so make healthcare more precise. I will argue that all the faults identified with regards to personalized medicine apply equally to precision medicine. First, doctors have been identifying and treating underlying causes of illness for centuries (if not millennia), so the idea that genomics somehow uniquely ushered in an era of treating causes (vs. symptoms) is misleading. Second, genomics is often imprecise; information about the pathogenicity of genetic variants changes frequently and it is fraught with clinical ambiguity. And third, precision medicine has continued to be surrounded by heady promises of miracle cures and breakthrough treatments which remain largely hype.
The talk will be given by Zoom at 6pm (Paris time zone, GMT+1):
Zoom link for the talk; everyone is welcome to join.

John Dupré is Professor of Philosophy of science at the University of Exeter (UK), with a main focus on philosophy of biology. He is the Director of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences.

 
Abstract
People still often think that viruses are tiny little things that cause disease by parasitizing larger organisms. Here I argue that viruses are not things, but processes, and while some do, of course, cause serious disease, many or even most may be important positive contributors to larger biological systems. Finally, returning to the mistaken characterization of viruses as things rather than processes, I show how this erroneous reification may have seriously harmful consequences for research.
 

Antoine Dussault is a philosophy teacher at Collège Lionel-Groulx (Sainte-Thérèse, Québec). He is also a researcher in the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur les sciences et les technologies (CIRST) and a regular member of the Centre de recherche en éthique (CRÉ). His areas of specialization are : philosophy of biology environmental ethics, philosophy of medicine.
Abstract
This presentation will be about a central dimension of the naturalism/normativism debate in the philosophy of medicine: the issue of whether pathology should be defined (fully or partly) in relation to the prudential concept of harm (e.g. Wakefield 1992; 2014), or exclusively in relation to biological notions of dysfunction and/or abnormality (e.g. Boorse 1997; 2014). I will defend the second approach, but argue, drawing on remarks by Wakefield (2014) and Kingma (2017) on challenges faced by fully functionalist accounts of pathology, that a functionalist account of pathology should focus on dysfunctions occurring at the level of organisms as a whole, rather than on dysfunctions occurring at the level of their parts (as Boorse’s BST and Wakefield’s HDA do). I will give a sketch of what such an account would look like, and situate it with respect to Boorse’s concept of illness (which he contrasts to pathology) and Werkhoven’s (2018) recent dispositional account.
Please find the video below :